04/30/2013

On Christmas eve 1976, I found J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit on a cinder-block bookshelf in my Aunt Francie’s apartment. Feigning repeated bathroom trips as an excuse to leave the dinner table, I sped through the book. By the time I was caught by dismayed parents who knew that a golden box containing both The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy awaited me in the morning, I had already finished the book, despite an over-long stop in Rivendell.

The surprise wasn’t ruined, though. Indeed, I found the trilogy to be hypnotic. Too young to understand the racism driving the books’ vision, I was half in love with Strider by the time Frodo left Bree. And the end of The Return of the King yielded even greater love: appendices explaining Elvish languages and alphabets that Tolkien conjured seemingly from the air.

I was eleven and audacious. If Tolkien could make up new alphabets, I could, too. So I grabbed crayons and paper and threw myself upon an avocado-green rug amid walls teeming with yellow and orange flowers. I set upon my quest.

When I tell this story in the classroom, it’s at this point that students begin to smile. They realize suddenly what’s coming.

04/23/2013

One of the most underrated terms of our times is “Abrahamic” religions (as opposed to “Judeo-Christianity”). In the post-9/11 era, it may be difficult for many to see the roots linking the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam. It may be even more difficult to see the rich history of Judeo-Islamic alliance.

This history perhaps is most visible in 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella expelled Jewish people from central Europe and the Ottoman Empire’s Sultan Bayezid II rescued more than 100,000 of those expelled. Known as one of the most devout Muslim rulers in history (his title “Sofu” means “the Pious” in Turkish), Sultan Bayezid invited Sephardic Jews to the center of his empire at a time when Jewish discrimination and expulsion were instituted in such European metropolises as Amsterdam, Paris, and Venice. While the ships of Columbus were initiating the transatlantic slavery route to be used for centuries by major European colonial powers, the Ottoman navy was carrying victims of Christian oppression to Muslim lands.

Why did an Ottoman sultan help the Sephardim? For those of us who have a myopic understanding of historical events and who evaluate Judeo-Islamic relations in the restricted context of Israel-Palestinian conflict, the fact of the help may seem surprising, even unbelievable.

04/16/2013

I'm teaching an Introduction to
Literary Criticism this semester
– well, I teach it every semester – and always at this point in
our readings, the students breathe a sigh of relief to have finished
their meanderings through Formalism, Structuralism, New Criticism,
Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction, some Foucault, Barthes, Saussure,
and even a little bit of the Russians. Now, we get into the identity
politics and some fun with Freud before we launch into Anglo-American
Feminist Studies where the conversations can't help but veer towards
the political spectrum of critical theory, even in a literature
course. Identifying phallic symbols always seems to crash that glass
barrier, and they begin to see structures of power even in their
daily lives. This year, though, the conversation has been
particularly engaging, I think because of these recent satirical
videos:

04/09/2013

Lately, Richard Blanco’s “One
Today,” a poem written for and read during President Obama’s second inaugural
ceremony, mingles with moments of my daily rushing and reflecting. The passage of time from yawning dawn hours to
the end of the workday frames the poem. Blanco suggests that the ordinariness
of activities performed—negotiating traffic, preparing for commerce, doing a
job, and going to school—can be a common point of reference for Americans. It
is a conceit that appeals to me because there I am, during my own rushed and
reflective commute, thinking about a poem that honors un-extraordinary moments
in a daily routine such as a drive to work that invites introspection.

04/02/2013

Recently, I was
fortunate to see Dionne Brand read from a work-in-progress titled The Versos of the Blue Clerk, or what is
withheld. My notes say that Brand says that her “job” as a
writer is to “to notice...and notice that you can notice” (Brand is such a
marvelous reader of her own work that I noticed that rather than take further
notes, I gave in to listening entirely).

Some of the
versos appear in Brick,
but Brand said that it’s unlikely that all will be published as one work.
Who, she wondered, will print a book with poems only on the left-hand page?

I became
familiar with Brand because scholars cited so often A
Map to the Door of No Return, a meditation on dispossession in
the Atlantic Slave Trade’s wake and waking dream. This dream, Brand observes,
produces in the African Diaspora “a set of stories which never come into being,
never coalesce.” What, then, she wonders, “can be called organization let alone
a schema” save the “persistence of the spectre of captivity”?

A Map to the Door is
also a meditation on books as objects that carry literature.

I’m having a terrible time
re-reading Dante’s
Inferno. I am in the middle of my
life (knock wood) and I’ve known that lost feeling as well as anyone. So, this
poem should speak to me even more than when I was younger. Years ago, when I
taught it, it was among my favorites. Now, I want to consign it to the heap—not even
to a purgatory for books I might one day return to.

Before, even where I did not
agree with it, I could praise its artfulness and complexities. Now, I am unable
to suspend my own moral code long enough to do so.

The Provost, who is relatively new to our campus, has been moving forward with these ideas in order to reverse the deadly budget crisis that has affected our campus in particular. As one of the larger CSUs (with 30,000 students), we were being asked to take some of the largest budget cuts over the last 20 years. Those funds have never been restored, and the faculty are dwindling because of it. This latest move to employ Udacity seems to put our particular kind of students at risk – those students who crave face-to-face contact, those students who drop out at an alarming rate of 55%, those students who are often the first members in their families to attend college, those students who take six classes to avoid staying another semester.

02/27/2013

Lately, I’ve been reading Plato’s Republic. This is technically a re-reading even though my last reading was so long ago that this reading perhaps ought to be cast as the first.

I’m reading the work in part because I’m writing a paper on Percival Everett’s very strange Zulus (1990), a book that rewrites Jean Toomer’s Cane, Frederick Douglass’s first autobiography, and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. (It also, I think, executes a truly mordant allusion to George H.W. Bush’s late-1980s invocations of a “thousand points of light.” )

I approach the Republic as a teacher of literature, not as a teacher of philosophy. And so I am struck by quite-literary things: the way, for instance, the entire dialogue is set in motion by slavery, namely the fact that Polemarchus sends his slave to ask Socrates and Glaucon to wait so that Polemarchus may catch up with them to chat.

Book I draws me especially to Thrasymachus, the character who, when challenged by Socrates, learns eventually a truth about himself so uncomfortable that it makes him blush: having not considered the complexities and depths of his most cherished positions, his default response is defensive anger rather than further thought. I have been like Thrasymachus before. I am likely to be like him again.

02/25/2013

This week, as an
interlude to my regular perambulations about screwing around,
playfulness, productive failure, gaming, and doing the risky thing, I
went on the road to give a talk at Austin College's Digital
Humanities Colloquium about the ideas scattered across my FairMastter posts. In “It's Not About the Tools: Weaving Digital
Humanities into Literature Courses,” I began with a definition of Digital Humanities, my definition of
Digital Humanities. Only five years after the realization that I am a
Digital Humanist, my definition has expanded and shrunk according to
the needs of my students and my institution's mission statement.

Being
a Digital Humanist doesn't necessarily involve having some sort of
street cred in coding or programming. Instead, Digital Humanities is
a broad umbrella that is full of shifting boundaries and disciplines.
We do old school, traditional stuff like reading print texts in
concert with new strategies for creating meaning and, eventually,
scholarship. Lately, we have even
felt significant backlash against the phrase and the movement.
William Pannapacker's latest Chronicle
article, “Stop Calling It 'Digital Humanities,'”
makes some suggestions for handling the situation. But what's more
interesting are the comments in this article – the overwhelming
question is still:

02/12/2013

I am among that first generation of academic computer users who used fonts for writerly deception and procrastination. In the late 1980s, toggling between the venerable (but compact) Times and the now-defunct Mac font New York could mean the difference between a paper on Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son that barely scraped onto a thirteenth page and one that screeched from a dot-matrix printer in full fifteen-page glory. (In my defense, I never resorted to the “triple-space action” or random diagrams made famous by this Strong Bad Email.)